Shooting at Houston high school injures student, 16

Published 6:00 pm, Tuesday, January 10, 2012

HOUSTON — An 18-year-old student brought a gun inside a Houston high school and shot a classmate in the leg Tuesday despite metal detectors that are supposed to keep weapons off campus, school officials said.

The other student, a 16-year-old freshman who was apparently a bystander to a dispute involving the shooter and some others in an upstairs hallway, was taken to a hospital in stable condition, said Sue Davis, a spokes-woman for the North Forest Independent School District.

A government teacher who happens to also work as a deputy constable wrapped up the shooter without a struggle, Davis said. That student was in police custody but no charges were immediately announced.

The shooting happened around lunchtime while most of the other 1,200 students were in the cafeteria, Davis said. No one else was injured.

The North Forest campus has metal detectors but they are only used in the morning, Davis said. Mere hours after the shooting, the district announced it would extend the hours the detectors would be operational and also pledged to purchase every student see-through backpacks.

“We’ll no longer allow backpacks that aren’t clear,” Davis said. She added, however, that the school did not yet know if the student brought the weapon on campus inside a backpack.

Davis said the shooting appeared to have been sparked by an off-campus dispute that spilled into the school hallways. The 16-year-old wasn’t involved in the dispute but wound up being shot, said Davis, who added it was unclear whether the shooter intended to fire at anyone at all.

The school was placed on lockdown for a half-hour and reopened later Tuesday.

Last week, a 15-year-old student in Brownsville was shot and killed in the hallway of his middle school by police who brandished a realistic-looking pellet gun.